


Mauve Letter Days

by grinningCalamity



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Not Beta Read, Sort Of, Time Travel Fix-It, but not in the way you think :3, chapters will also have tws in the notes!!, probably endgame jonmartin but its not the focus of the fic, starts around ep 38, will tag characters/ships/triggers as they come up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-02-23 04:36:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23139193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grinningCalamity/pseuds/grinningCalamity
Summary: Someone is meddling behind the scenes. The Institute staff, for varying reasons, are determined to get to the bottom of it.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 73





	1. July 29th, 2016

**Author's Note:**

> I started this from elias's pov and felt so angry while i was writing because i hate him so much he doesnt deserve a pov. bastard man.  
> anyways, hello welcome!! make urself at home, enjoy your stay!!  
> tw this chapter for mentions of being followed/watched, the general stuff from the s1 finale, and head injury!

Elias frowned, hands folded under his chin as he stared distantly at the door to his office. There was something off, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It was like something he could only see out of the corner of his eye- every time he shifted his gaze to Look at it, it was gone.

For the time being, he’d simply have to hope it wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

If it did come down to it, though… well. He’d figure something out. 

He always did.

~~~

Martin swore up and down that he was being followed. Not stalked, exactly- the feeling wasn’t always there, but it came frequently enough that he couldn’t brush it off as coincidence. Turning a corner, he’d catch a glimpse of a figure at the end of the hall, but by the time he reached _that_ corner, whoever it was was long gone.

He’d brought it up with the others, of course- with the entire Archives on high alert for Jane Prentiss, communication about potential intrusions was key. Nobody had been able to find anything, though, especially no evidence of Prentiss, so it was largely dismissed as lingering paranoia from his two week encounter.

He wasn’t being paranoid. He _knew_ he wasn’t being paranoid. Someone was there.

...Right?

~~~

Tim thought the whole thing was a being blown a little out of proportion. He wasn’t denying the danger of an encounter with Prentiss, of course, but the reactions seemed… excessive. So far, the worms had been appearing in reasonably stomp-able numbers, and they seemed unable to actually get into the building, so he didn’t quite get what everyone was so worked up about. Martin in particular.

He was a little worried about Martin.

He knew the experience at his flat must have been horrible, and he understood why Jon and Elias were letting him stay in the Archives, but the move only seemed to fuel Martin’s panic. He was sleeping with a _corkscrew_ , for God’s sake, and he kept rambling on about seeing mysterious figures and hearing strange noises. Jon had insisted they all investigate, which Tim wasn’t opposed to, really, but they had turned up absolutely nothing.

Martin still insisted, though.

Tim sighed, stretched in his chair, and headed out for his lunch break.

~~~

Jon shouted in panic, trying to scramble to his feet in a frantic attempt to stop Sasha, but the fresh stab in his leg quickly put an end to that, and then the door was shut. His gaze snapped to Martin, who was staring dumbfoundedly at the place Sasha had just been standing.

After a brief exchange, the recorder Sasha had knocked over was set back up, and Martin shakily recited what he’d seen through the window.

Silence fell.

Not much happened for a while. They talked, some of it morbid and some of it inane. They joked back and forth a bit, but their voices were heavy with fear and resignation.

Then the banging came, Tim broke through the bottom of the wall, and everything took a hard left turn.

~~~

Sasha shook with panic and exhaustion, leaning her back on the Artefact Storage door to try and catch her breath. After a few moments of focusing on her breathing, she clicked on the tape recorder she’d been left with after getting separated from Elias. She described it as a record for Jon to listen to later, but it was just as much her trying to calm herself down by just… narrating her train of thought. As she spoke, keeping her voice soft for reasons she didn’t feel like unpacking, she took small, quiet steps further into Artefact Storage, eyes moving from object to object. And… here was that table.

All at once, she felt the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand up, and the uncanny feeling of being watched exploded into her head. Whipping her head around, she just managed to catch a glimpse of an impossibly spindly figure for half a heartbeat, before her entire field of vision erupted into eye-searing pink and green and yellow and cyan and

Her head slammed into the edge of the table as she collapsed, and then Sasha was unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short first chapter, i know :pensive: but yeah thats what ive got so far!! no guaranteed update schedule for this, and i'll be writing as i upload, so. please bear that in mind and be patient :0  
> thank you for reading!!! :D


	2. July 29th, 2016-October 2nd, 2016

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tws for this chapter: blood/injury (just mentioned, not graphic), generic Prentiss stuff, death/murder (again mentioned, not graphic)

Sasha was gone.

Jon buried his face in his hands, taking deep, shaky breaths.

Sasha was gone, and Gertrude was murdered. By a human. A human with a gun.

He’d just finished recording everyone’s statements regarding the incident.

Everyone except Sasha, that is.

Because Sasha was gone.

No one knew what had happened. The last account someone had of her was Elias getting separated from her on the upper floors while running for the fire suppression system controls. He hadn’t seen where she’d ended up, and they’d scoured the Institute top to bottom.

There was no sign of her anywhere.

It didn’t take a genius to put it together. A missing person after an invasion of flesh-eating worms wasn’t exactly rocket science. But none of them had said it. It was as if they could maintain the illusion that she was alive as long as they stayed quiet, but the moment one of them spoke those words, the false reality would be shattered, and there would be no way to deny it anymore.

He remembered, briefly, his conversation with Martin.

_ Feigning ignorance… it just felt safer. _

_ Well... it wasn’t. _

~~~

It didn’t get better.

It was like Jon kept expecting Sasha to jump out of a corner somewhere, except she didn’t, of course she didn’t, and every time it didn’t happen it got worse. It was always getting worse.

It had been three months since the Prentiss attack. Three months since he and Tim got half eaten. Three months since Martin discovered Gertrude’s body. Three months since Sasha... vanished.

Even now, he couldn’t quite say it.

But someone was coming down to make a Statement, so he pulled himself together, set up the recorder, and opened the door to let her in when Tim let him know Helen Richardson was here.

~~~

Of course it was Michael.

Of course it was something else to remind him of Sasha.

Ms. Richardson had just left, and Jon almost called Sasha’s name, just on impulse, to let her know Michael had turned up again. He remembered just in time, and his mouth snapped shut.

Then a soft, echoing laugh rattled through the room, and with Jon looked up, he was met with the disorienting gaze of a person he was sure had not been there earlier.

~~~

Michael raised his- its?- hand towards its face, observing Jon’s blood as it dripped from the knife-like finger that it had stabbed into his shoulder. “You know,” It commented, and its tone was as if it were chatting about something as casual as the weather, “I’m a little miffed.”

“Oh,  _ you’re _ miffed? You, you showed yourself in and- took her, and stabbed me-”

It frowned sharply at him, and Jon took that as a cue to shut his mouth.

“It’s rude to interrupt, Archivist.” After watching him coldly for a moment, Michael sighed heavily, folding its arms and oh arms aren’t supposed to have  _ that  _ many joints are they- it was talking again. Jon did his best to ignore the  _ badwrong _ feeling its limbs gave him and focus on what it was saying.

“-already going to be interesting, but frankly, our little interloper- our  _ persona non grata _ , if you will- means I really have no idea how any of this is going to turn out.”

Well, that sounded important. “Are- what are you saying?”

Michael gave him an amused look. “I’m saying there’s a new player in the game, and they do seem to be quite the agent of chaos. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“Wait!” Jon bolted upright, then gasped in pain as his shoulder protested violently and he collapsed back into his chair. “Michael- Michael!”

But in the split second that his injury had distracted him, Michael had vanished.

Jon stared at the empty space where the… creature… had stood, and then, slowly, with his good arm, reached up and clicked off the tape recorder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: short first chapter yeah  
> me, writing the second chapter: wait this one's even shorter  
> anyways, thanks for reading!! let me know if you have any feelings about this!! i love to hear feedback :00


	3. February 12th, 2017

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tws this chapter are just discussion of murder/death!  
> season 2 jon is off the shits

Martin sighed heavily as he kicked the door to the break room shut behind him, carefully balancing a tray of mugs as he headed back towards the workspace. He set Tim’s on his desk, which the other man acknowledged with a grunt as he flipped through files with a frustrated expression. Martin let his gaze linger on him for a moment, turning away quickly when Tim finally glanced up. Neither of them spoke. Tim went back to his files.

Setting the tray down on his own desk, Martin picked up Jon’s tea and carried it to the office door, which he knocked on carefully.

A moment of silence passed, and he was just about to knock again when Jon’s voice called him in from the other side of the door. Quickly turning the handle with his non-tea-holding hand, Martin stepped in and took a look around the room.

All in all, it didn’t look too bad. It certainly wasn’t the messiest he’d seen it recently. He was ready to drop off the tea and go, but when he turned to set it on Jon’s desk, a slip of paper caught his eye. It was pinned to a corkboard haphazardly buried under other random papers, but enough of this particular note was visible for him to read it. In black ink, Sasha’s name had been scribbled in all caps and underlined several times. It was followed by several question marks.

Martin didn’t set down the mug. He just stared at the paper, until Jon apparently noticed and looked up.

“You can just leave that on the-” Jon cut himself off abruptly when he realized what Martin was fixated on. “A-Ah. That’s, that’s nothing, it’s old. Don’t- worry about it. Thank you, Martin, for the tea, you can go.” His voice was tense in a way that made Martin defensive.

“Well, hold on a minute! What’s- what’s this?” Setting the mug of tea on a nearby coaster, Martin quickly moved the other papers off of the corkboard, revealing it in its entirety.

It might as well have been a conspiracy board. For all Martin knew, it  _ was _ . It certainly seemed outlandish enough. Scraps of paper and sticky notes were tacked and pinned all over it, with threads of various materials and colors running taut between the different points. His eye caught on a bright green index card that said “MICHAEL” in red ink, then on a sheet of handwritten paper that appeared to be a transcript of a conversation, several pages torn from a daily calendar that were scattered around the board, a sticky note that read “Gertrude Murdered- gun”… there must have been dozens of notes and papers pinned to it. And there, just to the lower-left of center, was Sasha’s name.

“Jon,” Martin began, and his voice shook slightly. “What is this?”

“I, I told you, it’s old, I just haven’t gotten rid of it-”

Martin shook his head, pointing to one of the calendar pages. “That was only a month and a half ago, Jon. What is this?”

“It’s-” Jon hesitated, eyes flicking nervously between Martin and the board. For a tense few seconds, nobody said anything. Then Jon started talking rapidly, and the bubble burst. “Look, it’s not- I’m not  _ crazy _ , Martin, something’s going on here. I don’t know what it is, or why it’s happening, or who’s behind it, but I  _ know  _ there’s something bigger happening!”

“Jon-”

“You can’t say there’s not! Gertrude- Gertrude was murdered. You saw it yourself, someone, someone  _ shot her _ , with a  _ gun _ , it wasn’t any sort of, of supernatural monster, it was a  _ person _ , with a  _ gun, _ and-”

“Jon.”

“And God, it’s got something to do with Prentiss and Michael- Michael! Who the hell is he? Or, what is it, or- or whatever! He keeps showing up, between Sasha and Helen Richardson and Lydia Halligan, that’s three people who’ve encountered him, it, and everything it says and does is more cryptic than the last thing-”

“Jon!”

“And- God, Martin, can you let me  _ talk _ ?!”

“Stop it!”

Martin had shouted. That got Jon’s attention. They stared at each other for a moment, eyes wide, shoulders shaking.

“Stop it,” Martin repeated, softer, calmer. “Stop- stop this. You’re going to run yourself into the ground, Jon. And-” He broke off, staring expressionlessly at the paper that had first grabbed his attention. “You, you know she’s…”

“Martin-”

“Sasha’s  _ gone _ , Jon. I- I’m not being pessimistic, I want to believe she’s, she’s out there, somewhere, of  _ course _ I do, but it’s been over six months, and… she’s not, Jon. She’s just… not.”

“You don’t understand,” Jon replied intensely. His voice was low and serious, but there was a manic edge to it. “The- the  _ new player _ \- I think it’s her.”

“The what? Jon, please, you’re not making sense.”

“Michael said there was a ‘new player in the game’,” Jon explained, motioning to the transcript Martin had noticed earlier, which he now saw did seem to be a scene between Jon and Michael. “It called them an ‘interloper’ and a ‘ _ persona non grata _ ’. Someone- Someone’s gotten involved in a way that they weren’t supposed to, and it happened around the time of the Prentiss attack, I’m sure of it, because it didn’t say anything like that to Sasha when it taught her about the CO 2 , so they must have gotten involved sometime between Sasha’s encounter on April 1 st and my conversation on October 2 nd , and not only is the Prentiss attack right in the middle of that timeframe, Sasha went missing, so it  _ makes sense  _ that-”

“Jon.” Martin’s voice was tired, and he cradled his arms together as he continued. “Please stop.”

Jon fell silent, simply watching Martin for a minute. Then he moved the scattered papers back to their position hiding the board, making sure the whole thing was covered this time. “Thank you for the tea, Martin.” He didn’t look up from his arranging as he said it.

“…Yeah. Anytime.” He should say something. He knew he should say something. But he had no idea what words could possibly make this better.

So he left Jon’s office, closing the door softly behind him, and returned to his own work.

His tea was lukewarm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is as long as the other two combined because i was stuck on an airplane so i just Kept Writing  
> ty for reading!!! lmk if you have any thoughts or feelings!!!


	4. ??? ??th, ????

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tws for this chapter: none, really? sensory overload is the main thing here

It was dark, and then it wasn’t.   
Brilliant neon fireworks burst into life behind their eyelids, and even without opening its eyes xe knew where ze was. He couldn’t have pointed it out on a map, of course- this place didn’t work like that. It wasn’t a literal “where”, it was more of a… feeling. A sensation. An understanding that after a long, long journey, ce was finally home. Home, to a home fae didn’t know e had.   
_ That _ sent a spark of curiosity through tem. Opening vis eyes felt like a Herculean effort that zi simply didn’t have the energy for, so she let them stay closed, but they couldn’t help but wonder at whatever circumstances might lead someone to have first discovered their home at…   
At…   
How old was it? Xe couldn’t put hir finger on it. For some reason, that didn’t bother him. Ce felt, vaguely, in some distant part of faer mind, that it  _ should  _ bother em, but all tey could feel was an overwhelming urge growing in ver chest like an ever-expanding bubble, insistent and pressing and demanding, pushing organs aside in its relentless expansion- and shouldn't that hurt more than it did?- and zi knew that it was only a matter of time until--   
The bubble popped, and she couldn’t hold it in any longer. The giggle escaped them slowly, slipping from its mouth like air from a leaking balloon, but  _ oh _ , it felt  _ good _ . And the thought that something as small as  _ laughter _ could make xem feel this absurdly weightless, like ze was walking on clouds with an aspect of buoyancy he had never before experienced, only served to make cir laugh harder. And harder, and harder, and harder, until it felt like faer entire  _ form _ was going to split apart and unravel from the sheer ferocity of er convulsions, and just when it reached the point where tey were positive ve wouldn’t last another second without simply  _ exploding _ , a voice cut through zir spiraling cachinnation and all the vigor drained from her in an instant.   
It was not an inherently unkind voice, they didn’t think, although it couldn’t think of anything much beyond laughter and exhaustion in xer current state. The voice had a bit of a scratchy, raw quality to it, and the inflection on the words it spoke seemed every-so-slightly off. Ze wasn’t hearing it properly, either (although, what did “properly” even really mean?)- the voice seemed to project itself directly through the chaos and into his thoughts.   
_ “Hello there, little Twistling,” _ The voice began, and if it were communicating audibly, ce might have described it as having an audible grin.   
Fae started to respond, and then stopped, realizing that e didn’t know how.   
_ “Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself on _ my _ account,”  _ It cut in, still playful in its tone.  _ “You can just sit tight, and I’ll take care of everything.” _   
Yes. Sit tight. Rest? That sounded nice. Tey suddenly felt achingly tired. The heavy weight of fatigue seemed to tug at ver very bones. It was so incredibly loud here. So loud.   
_ “Oh, I know. You poor thing, you’re not used to this, are you? I’ll pull you out of here, and you can rest yourself. Don’t you worry.” _   
Ze could hardly think through the buzzing. The buzzing. So loud. So, so loud.   
_ “Auntie Mauve will take care of everything.” _ _   
_ Sasha James opened her eyes, and the world buckled at the seams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyyy another chapter!! I live!! sorry about the wait; it's really the end of the school year for me and finals are coming up in a week or two, so I've been a bit distracted from ao3! sorry about that!  
> it is another short chapter though, sorry :pensive:


End file.
